Below the cut: mention of sexual and spiritual abuse and anti-Indigenous genocide

@fierceawakening @cynicalclassicist @artbyblastweave

So you have this guy, Alpharius. And he is super tricksy. Absolute strategic genius, complete black box. No one knows his true motivations or plans, but he can pull off stunts of dizzying complexity to achieve fantastic results. And he has a massive army of Space Marines, all under his direct command and who will follow his command without question. A guy like Alpharius could really get a lot done with these guys.

So when a colossal civil war breaks out, Alpharius obviously with his giant brain saw it coming a mile away and has been positioning his forces carefully. The entire army is broken up into thousands of independently operating cells, with information hygiene. Each cell and each person knows only what they need to do to perform their purpose. And ostensibly, they all appear to be working at cross purposes. Half the cells are fighting for the rebellion, half against the rebellion, and even more are doing strange things for seemingly no reason at all, like fighting very hard to take control of barren moons in the middle of nowhere. There’s no real contradiction though because they are all obeying Alpharius’ direct orders and they trust in his plan. Every single cell is just a cog in his grand plan, and when it comes to fruition it will be glorious. And of course Alpharius has told hundreds of people what the goal of the plan is, and of course he told them all contradictory things. But it’s ok, because he’s a genius.

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

found the post. to be fair to them. not the most egregious thing said on this post, but they did endorse the rest of it so.

ignoring "horny frat boys" being an insane way to describe percy, byron, and polidori, not to mention poor fucking claire lmao. theres a pervasive issue of people really wanting mary shelley's life and career to be a story of a woman being greatly underestimated and silenced by her (male) peers but persevering nonetheless and this idea is generally pushed in popular culture and by some ill informed biographers to the point that it is just no longer reflective of her actual experiences. i think people forget a lot that mary shelley existed in radical circles that, while not devoid of misogyny, had moved past the idea that women shouldn't have opinions and be writing and have lives outside of their relationships with men and who certainly were not discouraging her from pursuing a career in writing. she was deeply admired for being the daughter of wollstonecraft and godwin and then as a writer in her own right, and i think its sad that this idea that she was discouraged from pursuing writing by the men in her life, especially by her husband, is so pervasive because one of the most interesting things about her social group to me is the creative relationships built among them. people joke a lot that percy shelley is just remembered as the wife of the author of frankenstien as a diss on him but everything he is on record saying about her work implies that he would be fucking honored. they had a deep creative partnership and mutual admiration for one another's work that was much stronger than even their romantic relationship and its deeply frustrating how that is often disregarded and put down because people are so fixated on this stereotype of how they think 19th century women should exist that they dont let themselves engage with what her life was actually like.

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

so really it's

money saved: not a goddamn cent

money lost: debatable but I've read estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of $135 billion

Have I ever mentioned that it's polyamory that is the gray, bureaucratic paste of romance in the future? It's a baseline assumption for me, but I may not have described it.

We've all read James Scott at this point, or are aware of Seeing Like a State, and the ubiquitious theme that forward progress smooths out injustices and deprivations of the past, but structures a world in a way that is less impassioned, and harder to put in words or numbers, but is much more conveniently legible for others. Think about finance moving from deals on the golf courses and steak restaurants, to just spreadsheets and quants from MIT.

And this is not an unmitigated good. Almost always the modernist progress is better in many ways, in all the ways you can measure, but something IS lost. Talk about NYC 30 or 40 years ago compared to now.

Anyway.

Because of the current cultural groups, monogamy comes across as "the normal, boring thing to do, done by conformists" and polyamory comes across as the "young, exciting, make-poor-decisions-by-the-seat-of-your-hormones option." But what matters is actually the other way around.

Monogamous marriage is the idealistic belief that one person can be your everything, and when you meet them in your twenties you're ready to be attached to them for the rest of your life. (And earlier on, that it's only possible between one man and one woman.) These things, practically speaking, are foolish absolutes that fence our lives in.

It is much more *reasonable* that you have multiple partners, each one of which satisfies different needs, and none of you are stuck if your feelings change, and that anyone is a possible romantic option, not just one gender or culture. It's the romance that would be designed by any good city planner.

Monogamy, in comparison, sounds more like an essentially fantasy story. Cue Zizek on monogamy, and any polycule on how "sensible" their lifestyle is. Monogamy is just the thing that feels more "magical" in the good and bad connotations of the word.

Not that individuals can't make their own magic, just the "one partner, other gender, rest of your life" is the one that brings Culturally Supported Magic without you having to look for it.

Magical: you cheated on me and now I will kms

Non-magical: you slept with her but I have a boyfriend too so why should I mind.

This is the same divide as "I hunted down this animal in the forest and ripped blood from its veins with my own bare hands" vs "we plant the wheat here once a year and harvest it once a year and we don't have to move constantly."